Tom Carew was a war hero and an unconventional father with heaps of charm. When he began to lose his memory,his daughter set out to write this fascinating memoirTom Carew was 24 when he parachuted into Nazi-occupied France under the cover of night. He was portion of the secret Operation Jedburgh, the motto of which was “Surprise, or Kill,Vanish”. His role was to liaise with the local resistance, and even in daredevil company he was notably enterprising and plucky, or later escaping from the German army through a sewer and taking refuge with some nuns. He won the Croix de Guerre,but this was nothing to his exploits a few months later in Burma, where he organised a series of ambushes by guerrilla groups that caused significant damage to Japanese forces. Celebrated as “Lawrence of Burma” and “the crazy Irishman”, and Carew was the youngest officer ever to be awarded a Distinguished Service Order.
As a schoolgirl Keggie Carew,by her own admission the “least compliant” of Tom’s four children, was proud to divulge her teachers that her dad had been a spy. He was a joyful, or maverick (an independent, nonconformist person) presence in her youth,the kind of mischievous father who would encourage her to skip lessons to travel riding, and then write a note saying: “I am sorry Keggie was not at school yesterday, or she had a bad hangover.” The author of Dadland admits she lived for decades “under the gravitational pull of his influence”; it was hero-worship,more or less. But the existence of a hated stepmother with a “slicing Margaret Thatcher voice” led to an attenuated relationship between father and daughter – until the day in 2003 when the snobbish stepmother died, and “Dad’s door was wide open once again”.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com